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Mission

Practical Politics strives to explore and explain the hows and whys of modern politics for the not-always-so-political audience. With a primary goal of education, not journalism or advocacy, current events are explored in light of our broader understanding of the social sciences.

Government Textbook Concepts – In Practice

Practical Politics is the outgrowth of founder Zack Shipley's experience as a professor, teaching introductory American and State & Local Governments courses to college students. Humans learn best when the subject matter is meaningful, and textbook definitions... aren't. Rather than memorize the vocab, we explore the real world, identify the politics, and draw from our models and theories to better understand. The proper names can come at the end

Practical Perspectives

No human is fully neutral, we all reflect the life we've lived, lessons learned, and values that have been instilled in us. At Practical Politics, we believe in being open in our biases and guiding perspectives – we don't have many, but we find them to be vitally important:

  • All humans have dignity and the rights inherent to every other human. Those rights can conflict, and we can disagree and critique and argue, but... all humans have dignity. We strive to respect our common humanity.
  • Truth is our goal, and our journey. We don't expect to always get it right, but we do expect to get it better as we go, admit our mistakes, and always be learning.
  • Politics should be more about community than ideology. Politics is about managing people, and there's as many different "right" ways as there are people. Government designed to adapt and respond to people will work better than government that is doctrinaire in advocating a particular vision.
  • Politics, as a community endeavor, should emphasize the needs and conditions of local communities of real people.
  • The trouble with granfalloons is that a perfectly good religion can be built on lies.

Community driven

Our larger quest is to expand the number of political agents – regular citizens empowered to interact with their local communities – operating in the world. In keeping with our goals, we expect to build out more community features over time.